Hello! In this blog, we are going to see how CAF and WAF help organizations adopt and improve their Cloud deployments. First of all, lets see what each of these offer individually and then we will see how both can co-exist and work together.

Cloud Adoption Framework

As per Microsoft’s definition The Cloud Adoption Framework is a collection of documentation, implementation guidance, best practices, and tools that are proven guidance from Microsoft designed to accelerate your cloud adoption journey. So it basically helps in adopting the cloud with all the best practices defined in a single place. It has several phases, which lets us categorize the actions that are needed to be performed for better and efficient adoption. Let’s see what all those phases are-

• Strategy - This phase basically talks about the motivation and business requirements. Following this phase, you define what business outcomes you are expecting to achieve, while considering the financial and technical investments an organization may need to put aside.
• Plan - In this phase, you start with taking inventory of your digital estate and defining the action plan of cloud adoption journey. You start looking into the gaps you may have in terms of skills required for the adoption.
• Ready - In this phase, you start building your Azure setup by creating a Landing Zone. This Landing Zone comprises of basic infrastructure components required to build up a standard layout with governance pieces in place. So that you can implement your environment on top of it, with the governance controls already in action.
• Adopt - During this phase, you need to decide whether you would be migrating your on-premise workload as it is, or you would be investing in efforts to innovate using different business ideas you may have in your queue for your organization.
• Govern - This is more of a continuous phase, where you start with implementing governance policies in your Landing Zone. Then you keep assessing your current governance posture and also keep implementing new and updated policies to ensure better governance controls.
• Manage - In this phase, you define the criticality classifications, cloud management tools, and processes required to deliver your minimum commitment to operations management.

Well-Architected Framework

As per Microsoft, The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding tenets that can be used to improve the quality of a workload. The framework consists of five pillars of architecture excellence: Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, Reliability, and Security. Incorporating these pillars helps produce a high quality, stable, and efficient cloud architectures.

You might have seen these five pillars in my previous blog about Azure Advisor, if not check here.

So WAF basically focuses on the best and industry-standard practices which you can refer to make sure the application you are running in Cloud is properly architected. Hence the name!

Let’s see the pillars which WAF talks about-

• Cost Optimization- In this pillar, Microsoft tells you about the ways you can control costs in your Azure environment. Moreover, it provides different scenarios for different phases like design, provision, monitor and optimize which you can adopt to implement better controls in terms of visualizing the usage of your resources and ultimately the costs.
• Operational Excellence- This pillar describes the ways in which you can achieve substantial reliability and make the processes automated. You will see different scenarios here regarding CI/CD pipelines, using IaC for your deployments, DevOps practices as well as the importance of incorporating Tests in your application deployments.
• Performance Efficiency- When you deploy an application in Cloud, you start with a minimum and maximum load in mind and accordingly you assign the computing and storage power. But with time, your application may need more resources or more instances of the same application to handle the plethora of incoming requests. This pillar specifically talks about the ways in which you can achieve better performance from your application with automated scaling out/in or scaling up/down configured.
• Reliability - This pillar talks about how you can save your applications running in Azure from datacenter-level to region-level failure. It lists different scenarios where it would make more sense to use Availability Zones instead of Availability sets, or Recovery Services instead of highly-available instances.
• Security - Last but not the least, this pillar describes different ways in which you can use multiple Azure services to secure your infrastructure starting from Physical security to securing your Data.

Can CAF & WAF work together for you?

The answer is absolutely yes! The way you can make both of these frameworks work for you, depends on the stage you are at in terms of your cloud journey. You can always start with CAF if you are new to Cloud and would like to understand the different services and tools you may use to implement your current infrastructure. The more you grow your footprint in Cloud, the more services you start playing with. WAF can anytime be referenced irrelevant of the phase you are in currently. WAF helps you understand the architecture from the scenario point of view while CAF gives you the understanding of different tools and services available in Azure for you to make use of.

In other words, CAF let’s you make sure if ‘You are doing it right?’ while WAF helps in ensuring if ‘You have done it right?’. Also, WAF offers assessment tools that can help you assess your current state and prepare a report on any of the five pillars you want. Check the assessment tool here.

So all in all, WAF and CAF offer a great deal of help for Partners as well as Customers to ensure they get on Azure with less downtime and their Azure infrastructures are following the best practices and also saving costs.

That was it! I hope it was helpful.

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